Hunting For Civility

You’ve reached a certain age – or at least a certain level of crankiness – when your rants start off with “I’m old enough to remember when…”
I say that more often these days. It’s not that I idolize the past; I like my modern conveniences as much as the next guy who yells “Hurry up!” at the microwave oven. It’s just that I remember a time when people were more civil to each other.
It’s been years, but I remember reading an article about road rage on the rise. The author pointed out that the penalty for incivility behind the wheel was rather low in modern society. It was unlikely you and the object of your rage would be seated in the same pew in church the following Sunday or recognize each other while shopping in a big-box store. Near-certain anonymity fosters incivility by weakening the forces that made good behavior more important than just being the polite thing to do.
My perennial rant at hunting season is that I’m old enough to remember when hunters stopped by the house to ask my parents if they could hunt on our property. They didn’t have to. Then, as now, our land’s current-use status with “recreational adjustment” gives us a property tax break in exchange for allowing access to our property for certain uses, including hunting. But it was the civil thing to do. In the 20 years I’ve been back here, it’s only happened twice.
When my Southern-born wife learned of current-use laws she was shocked. My explaining about “public interest” and the property tax benefit did little to mollify her. She assured me that even as a city gal she knew that rural Southerners had a different attitude toward private property. (Cue the “Deliverance” dueling guitar and banjo.)
At the beginning of this hunting season when I saw trucks parked on the road near our property I again mentally added “Post the land” to my to-do list. By spring my flash of anger will have abated. I will convince myself that posting the property and potentially losing the tax break doesn’t make financial sense and, well, just isn’t neighborly.
Neighborliness has its limits, though. Ten years ago, a few of my neighbors – I never figured out which ones – started to run snowmobiles and ATVs on old logging trails across my property. I didn’t object until they started cutting down my trees and posting directional signs to make the trails more user-friendly. Using my property is one thing; using it like it’s your own is quite another. A strongly-worded letter to a couple dozen addresses, some orange plastic fencing at the property line, and some trees cut across the trails put an end to the abuse.
I’m not a hunter, but not because I object to it. It’s just that there are so many tasty cuts of meat available conveniently packaged at the market. The idea of spending time tracking down a woodland creature and dealing with its carcass doesn’t appeal. But I have no problem with the idea of neighbors filling a freezer with meat the hard way, and I have several friends who consider it great sport.
Turning to one of those friends this year, I asked about the idea of gaining permission prior to hunting. He hunts on his own property and assured me that he had a few folks who asked permission to hunt his land each season. He sent me the form he created that he signs and gives to those hunters with the “old fashioned” values.
Since I’m unlikely to post the land and it’s even more unlikely that some hunter is going to come knocking at my door, I decided to approach the problem creatively. I remembered walking the property one morning with a forester planning our first select-cut tree harvest. We had been stomping around for many minutes marking the valuable timber when movement caught my eye. About 10 yards away a man in a ghillie suit carrying a bow stood up, and without a word or other acknowledgement slowly walked down the trail. Not even the forester’s dog had detected him. Clearly, we had interrupted a well-planned hunt with our noise and activity.
Next year on the first day of deer season I think I’ll throw eight new D-cells into my old boom-box and put it on the stone wall separating our field from the lower woods. I’ll turn the volume up to eleven and blast Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba” on continuous loop. I don’t know who will be more disturbed, the hunters or the deer.
It’s not the civil thing to do. But it is my property after all.